


A Discovery on Angellus

by gloriouscacophony (KatrinaKay)



Series: Ineffable Husbands Week 2019 - SFW [4]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alien Mythology/Religion, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space, Ancient Technology, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, New Planets, Nonbinary Character, Other, Seraphim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-10 23:43:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20536592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatrinaKay/pseuds/gloriouscacophony
Summary: Ineffable Husbands Week - Day 4: Senses (Touch/Sight/Hearing/Taste/Smell)In which Crowley and his research assistant find the ruins of the ancient Seraphim civilization on the unexplored planet Angellus, including a mysterious glowing orb that has been calling out to the half-demon from across the stars.





	A Discovery on Angellus

  
_ Interplanetary Sector Σ6, Regional Location 75.511.3254 - Angellus_  
_ STATUS: Unsurveyed - INHABITANTS: None - ATMOSPHERE: 22% oxygen_  


Crowley fiddles with the touchpad on his suit sleeve, adjusting the oxygen levels and air pressure to compensate for the atmospheric difference before the airlock opens with a hiss. He and Newt step out carefully, scanning their surroundings quickly even though their preliminary scans have shown no life forms, water sources, or other signs of habitation. Angellus is dusty, cratered, and barren, like the surface of Gaia’s moon. The ruins that dot its surface are buried beneath eons of silt, blown by the thin winds to fill buildings to their roofs and beyond.

Once, the Seraphim lived here in magnificent palaces, surrounded by lush, verdant gardens that fed on the warmth of the sun and spilled the scent of honeysuckle into the air. Once, the echoes of celestial harmonies could be heard in the marble halls as the Seraphs worshipped their deity and crafted existence in Zir’s image. Once, there was life and warmth and color on this planet. But that was long, long ago, before terrestrials had left Gaia to venture out into the universe, to learn of and befriend and breed with its many species.

Now, Crowley and Newt crunch over brittle, fossilized remnants of those beings and places, and all else is still.

All else, except the quiet whisper of sentience that had somehow reached out beyond the planet, calling _ I am here, I am here _ from beneath, waiting.  


* * *

  
They follow the blips of the touchpad to discover an immense structure, still seemingly intact but entrenched in a dune of fine, powder-white sand, its intricate spires reaching towards the sky like fingers of an outstretched arm.

Whatever has sent the signal that led them here, on this research mission, it’s inside this place.

Newt and Crowley take turns digging where they guess the door might be, and soon they’re hacking away at the petrified wood. It finally gives way, too dry to protest further, and they stumble into an arch-filled hall that seems to stretch for miles. Their headlamps barely illuminate the dark, but in the murk they can make out the basic structure: two corridors, one to either side, and at the end, an apse. As they walk, though, glowing orbs appear, floating along the walls and offering a warm, flickering light with the instability of devices long unused.

Newt sets up a comms link at the center of the room, where the four wings meet, to give a status update to their crew back at their mech-transport as Crowley investigates a faint sparkling that’s caught the light of the orbs.

The massive mural makes his yellow, serpentine eyes widen. It’s a host of Seraphim, gathered with arms and feathered wings raised in praise of their god (whose name is lost now) depicted as a glowing, golden orb decorated in gold leaf that had snagged his attention even from a distance. He studies at the massive, elaborate artwork until Newt shouts to him.

In his mind, he hears the whisper _ This way come I am here _ stronger from the left corridor. Newt stares at him when he says this, mumbling and stuttering as he looks through the notes in his touchpad and tablet, then shrugs and says it’s as good a place to start as any.

The doors at the end of the corridor open with a pneumatic hiss, and then they’re breathing stale air that’s been locked away for a very long time. Orbs, as well as strips of lighting wires, flicker into life, and they’re outside of an elevator of some kind. It, too, clicks and whirs and stutters to life, its cloudy transparent doors sliding back to admit them.

After five minutes, their touchpads let out warning chirps alerting them of comms failure. From here, they’re on their own. Newt is sweating, but Crowley relishes the heat of the elevator capsule (he’s always so _ cold_; being cold-blooded is one of the many not-so-wonderful side effects of being half demon).

When the elevator finally releases them, they’re deep underground. The room they enter appears to have been some sort of foyer, with many doors and now-dry fountains and the barest remains of some sort of plant life that looks to have once been landscaped into orderly, cultivated plantings. Newt takes a small sample of one, causing the rest of the shrub-like plant to crackle into particles of dust that sends him into a coughing fit. Crowley rolls his eyes and slinks forward, making his way to the door at the far end of the room.

He passes flat, black-screened devices on pedestals (_Had they been some sort of comms or media device?_) near the door. But they don’t respond to any gestures or touches, so he and Newt move on.

The rooms they’re in now are more structured, perhaps the remains of laboratories or computational facilities. There are tables and equipment benches, with tools made of metal and glass that neither of them can identify. And more of the dark, quiet screens, some nearly the size of walls, are here, affixed to the glass walls of empty holding cells. Whatever was held here, even their remains have vanished with time.

_ Almost almost I’m here please come_, the voice says to Crowley, and he follows it to a heavy, serious-looking door at the end of the room. But it, too, hisses open to admit them, and they’re on a platform high above a dark tunnel that stretches beyond their sight above and below.

And there, at the center of the platform, floats a great glowing blue orb. Newt gapes, frozen, at the sight, but Crowley hears it whisper _ Come please it’s you _ and approaches, forgetting everything else. Streaks of light ebb and flow across the orb’s surface, and it hums low, a frequency that sounds like a happy cat purring, as he nears.

“What _ are _ you?” Crowley asks, reaching out a gloved hand slightly. The hair on his arms raises as the current near the orb sends goosebumps across his skin, like the approach of lighting during an electrical storm.

_ Seraph seraph seraphim, _ the orb chirps at him. _ Aziraphale. _

“Crowley, what are you doing, don’t touch it!” Newt shouts at him, and he turns back to the man, who’s looking at the orb like a bomb that’s about to explode or a black hole that’s trying to suck them into its void.

“Newt, you’re not going to believe me when I tell you what it just told me.”

“Are you sure—”

Then Crowley hears it again, only this time the voice isn’t in his mind, it’s loud and clear enough that Newt hears it too: _ Seraph Aziraphale trapped help please _

Crowley raises his eyebrows at Newt, who looks as though he’s going to vomit. “Did you just—am I—must be a hallucination…”

The half-demon just groans in impatience. “Right, a hallucination. That’s how we got millions of credits in funding, found a ship and a crew, navigated here, and then found this. We’re just in a nutrient tank right now, sleeping in our vitamins,” he bites out sarcastically.

“When you put it that way...but there’s no way this thing is a Seraph. They died out eons ago in the great war, and according to all of our records, that’s not what they looked like.”

“Well if they all died out, how did we get all the bloody records when no one’s been to this planet since before the great war?”

They bicker back and forth for a few minutes, Newt getting more curt and Crowley becoming more infuriated and antsy, until Newt falls silent staring at the orb over Crowley’s shoulder. The half-demon’s words die in his throat as he turns to see that the orb, formerly an opaque, Gaia-sky blue, has cleared enough to let them see its inhabitant, curled as if in slumber within.

It’s the most beautiful being Crowley has ever seen in his long, long life. White-blond ringlets frame its face, flowing ever-so-slightly in the current within the orb. Its body is softly rounded and plump, the fabric of its robe clinging to every curve. Wrapped around it in a loose cocoon are massive white wings.

“That _ is _ what they looked like, Newt,” Crowley hisses softly, not turning away from the sight of the being. 

Before his companion can stop him, he takes off his glove, moves closer, and brushes his bare fingertips to the orb’s surface. Everything vanishes into a howling, shrieking white nothingness.

* * *

  
When Crowley returns to consciousness, he sees Newt sprawled a dozen feet away, still knocked out but otherwise apparently unharmed. He wiggles his fingers and toes to stir the blood and restore feeling to his tingling limbs as he blinks his eyes open. When he sits up, black spots speckle his vision for a moment, then the world rights itself and he can see again.

And there, standing in the viscous remains of the orb, is the Seraph Aziraphale, beaming at him with a broad, grateful smile that crinkles the corners of their eyes. Their wings are folded demurely behind them, but they rustle as though affected by some unfelt current, perhaps a sense memory from the time spent in the orb.

They stare at each other as Crowley scrambles to his feet, his hand instinctively going to the weapon holster at his hip.

“I’m, er, Crowley. Hi, er, Aziraphale?” If what they know of Seraphs is true, this thing could kill him with a snap of their fingers or a nod of their head, and now, idiot that he is, he’s set them free. _ Wouldn’t that just take the cake, to spend all this money and time on a ghost chase that actually finds the ghost, and oh look, it wants to murder us! _

The Seraph tilts their head at him in bemusement, then ponders for a moment. When they speak, their voice has a lilting accent similar to Crowley’s, as though the being had come from the same territory on Gaia. 

“Hello, Crowley. It’s so good finally to meet you.” They notice the tension in his posture and the hand ready to grip his gun. “I’m not going to hurt you. You have no idea how long I’ve waited for someone who could _ hear _ me. All my brothers and sisters, gone, and here I was, left alone...It’s such a relief to be out of there.”

Is the Seraph..._ babbling _ at him?

“Urkg…” Crowley replies, lost for words. A scuffling noise startles him, and he turns just in time to see Newt fire his gun at Aziraphale.

He shouts, heart sinking in surprisingly deep grief and fury and shock, and runs over to snatch the weapon from Newt’s hands and chuck it over the edge of the platform. 

But somehow, Aziraphale is unharmed, only looking down at a few faint smudges on their robe where the rounds should have fatally penetrated his physical form. “I suppose that was one benefit to being in that holding chamber, no one _ shooting _ at me for just saying hello,” the Seraph grumbles, swiping a hand over the fabric to wipe the stains away.

* * *

  
On their journey back to the mech-transport, Crowley can see the tears fall silently from Aziraphale’s pale blue eyes at the eradication of their former home. He can’t blame the Seraph, even though the grief is uncomfortable to witness. They had spent several long minutes kneeling and looking up at the mural in the apse after asking quietly for a moment alone. The soft echoes of a one-sided conversation reach Newt and Crowley even at a respectful distance.

At one point in their trek, the Seraph had gripped Crowley’s hand in their own, and he’d tried to pull away until the forlorn look in Aziraphale’s eyes needled its way into his chest and made him relent. Even through his glove, he could feel the heat of the being’s hand and instantly felt warmer, despite the chill of the wind surrounding the trio.

“Where will we go?” the Seraph asks him, when they return to the ship, as they wait for the medics to finish running tests and the security team to finish their threat assessments. They still haven’t let go of Crowley’s hand, clinging to him amidst the din of questions and pokes and prods.

“Anywhere you like, angel. Anywhere you want to go.”

**Author's Note:**

> So this is *not* where I expected to go with this prompt, but I've been playing a lot of Mass Effect recently. This was a lot of fun to write, and I could definitely see this AU offering enough material for a much longer work/series in the future, who knows.
> 
> Visual of what I imagine the orb to look like: pinterest.com/pin/419116309057642174/  
Suggested soundtrack: "Cosmos" - George Kallis


End file.
